Week #2: Assembling the Dream 100

As of this week, we are about 14 weeks away from launching the new book.

As I mentioned in the first post, I’m a big believer in digging your well before you’re thirsty…

That’s why I’m making a special effort to build relationships over the next 14 weeks…

It’s critical to give the people who might promote my book plenty of time heads up.

Most successful influencers that could sell a lot of your books have promotional calendars. But usually these people spend 90% of their time promoting their own products and services and maybe 10% towards other people…

They may take two or three people a year to promote… so we have to get in early.

So we had a Dream 100 meeting where we sat down as a group and started building our list.

The Dream 100 is a hundred people who are influencers (e.g. list owners, podcasters, bloggers, social media influencers) who already have your dream customers in their following…

What we want to do is identify who these influencers are and aggressively market to them so that they might promote us to their audiences.

As you’ll see in the upcoming weeks, we don’t rely 100% on this strategy because we know a lot of people can’t or won’t be able to promote. That’s why we’ll also be using this Dream 100 list to target through the different networks.

For today, we’re working on relationship building.

Going to the masses…

This is the first product we have that not just people who are teaching Internet marketing could use. A lot of people in personal development could use it, weight loss gurus could give this to their audience and so on.

So even if someone typically doesn’t talk to their audience about making money or business they can say,

“Hey, you probably notice that I’m an expert. I have a platform. I have followers. I’m making money teaching you how to lose weight. If you want to learn how I do this part of my business, you should go get this book.”

This book will open up for us a world that is a lot bigger than the DotComSecrets book did.
So we first identified the different markets we wanted to build the Dream 100 around.

After we built that we sat down and started thinking of who are Dream 100 would be in each category.

We had a list of all the list owners in the market

A list of all the podcasters…

A list of all the bloggers…

A list of all the social media influencers…

We tried to make a list of at least 100 people in each of these different markets.

Then we had to devise a strategy on how we were going to go about contacting everybody.

A funny twist…

For us, one of the first things we created was a really cool comic book to send to our Dream 100.

First off, we thought it would be kind of funny

Second off, it would let them know about our vision and mission….

I want them to feel like they’re a part of what we’re trying to do. I don’t want them to feel like they’re just building Russell’s company…

I want them to feel like this is a movement that they’d want to join in on.

So if you look at the Avenger’s comic book (and maybe I’ll share this in future episodes), it basically tells a story line of us, how ClickFunnels got started…

It talks about how initially we were competing against Loki Pages (ha ha) and now we’re competing against a bigger enemy, Confusionsoft…

It tells the story in a really fun way and, at the end, it talks about how we’re assembling our Dream 100 to help us beat this new competitor.

Most of our audience does not like “Confusionsoft” so we’re trying to get them to become part of our team to help us beat them out. The next phase of that battle is actually the promotion of the Expert Secrets book.

So we’re going to be sending everyone this comic book in the mail, along with a letter explaining more about Expert Secrets, explaining what’s happening, getting the date on their calendar, and so on and so forth.

This is a fun and unique way to stick out in a very cluttered market…

The package is going to include the comic book along with a pre-released copy of the book and hopefully (if I can get it done in time) a letter explaining the dates, the times, and why we’d love them to be involved in the product launch.

The grunt work…

One of the first things we have to do is gather all the names and contact info for all the Dream 100 in all these different markets so we can ship them things.

Tedious, but necessary.

We’ve tried contacting our Dream 100 in the past in a lot of different ways. This is what we’ve found:

Email is the worst way to get people’s shipping addresses.

The easiest way is to message people through my account telling them I’ve got a gift I want to ship to them and ask them for their best address…

It seems like 9 out of 10 people are willing to give me their mailing address if I just ask them where I should ship them a gift. So that’s what’s happening right now.

That’s been our focus this week: to prepare for this book launch. Obviously, our goal is big so 1,000,000 is not going to be easy so we need to assemble our Dream 100 right now as we speak.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.